Citizen Engagement Blog

Federal, State and Local governments are promoting shared services to check some critical boxes:

• Saving money by taking greater advantage of existing IT resources
• Improving citizen customer service with limited resources
• Reducing redundancy from multiple distributed and duplicative IT functions
• Taking the next step in IT optimization, which began with datacenter consolidation
• Supporting the move from on-premise infrastructure to the cloud

Take stock of shared service options and benefits to increase citizen customer service efficiencies. These facts and proof points will help.

This week, large city and county CIOs and CTOs came together at the Government Technology (GovTech) Digital Communities Large City/County Fly-In hosted by the Washington D.C. CTO, Archana Vemulapalli, and her team. Important and common government priorities being discussed included: IoT governance, identity and security management, government workforce and technology opportunities.

As a technology sponsor of this event, we were invited to join the discussion and learn from technology leaders from some of the top cities and counties in the U.S. As COO at Contact Solutions, a Verint Company, I was privileged to have deeper discussions with many city and county leaders, along with our Operations Analyst, Christina Mero, and offer these timely collective insights. 

Population aging has been called the “silver tsunami,” as cited in the Pew Internet Project’s 2001 “Wired Seniors” report, which was a catalyst early warning sign of things to come. Now, it appears the wave of Baby Boomer retirements from the government is about to hit.

While this retirement juggernaut was originally supposed to crest in 2011, many public sector employees delayed their exit due to the economic effects of the recession. Currently, 2017 is the target year. Are you ready?

Transportation depends on fast customer service to serve citizens on-the-go. Today we announced our latest implementation of voice self-service and speech technology implented to solve government and citizen needs.  This new contract introduces IVR self-service to a large initiative to support its modernization goals to bring:

• Better customer service
• Improved customer experience (CX)
• Secure, improved way to interact with common transportation interactions

Read the full press release to learn more.

With the need for more personalized and secure customer service on the rise, right along with the rise in costs and complexities of managing a contact center, government agencies have to be as smart as possible when contracting and managing technology projects. A dynamic IVR is one way to beat the budget vs. customer experience challenge for public sector customer service. Even Millennials would agree.

In a previous blog post about modernizing state contact centers, we encouraged government agencies to introduce digital engagement opportunities via web, mobile web, and mobile apps as part of their contact center modernization efforts. But that doesn’t mean agencies should dismiss or downplay traditional phone calls. Here’s why: